Skip to main content

Featured Post

Infinite Country by Patricia Engel | Thoughts

   Published : 2021   ||    Format : print   ||    Location : Colombia ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆   What was it about the country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.. Thoughts : Infinite Country follows two characters - young Talia, who at the beginning of this book, escapes a girl’s reform school in North Colombia so that she can make her previously booked flight to the US. Before she can do that, she needs to travel many miles to reach her father and get her ticket to the rest of her family. As we follow Talia’s treacherous journey south, we learn about how she ended up in the reform school in the first place and why half her family resides in the US. Infinite Country tells the story of her family through the other protagonist, El

2016 Review and Planning for 2017

Hello fellow readers, bloggers, and dear friends! I've been semi-struggling with squeezing blogging back into my life. Not due to a lack of prioritizing but because quite a few chess pieces are still moving right now at my end. I'm hoping to be around sporadically until they are sorted out - I just need to figure out how to do it.

Anyways, I wanted to do a 2016 review before it got too late to talk about 2016. The whole of January qualifies as a good time to do such a post, correct?

2016 in books

In so many ways, 2016 was one of my best reading years. I read and listened to a good variety of books. My reading was mostly spontaneous with no reading list guiding it. Sometimes I read the book that everyone was talking about and sometimes I picked a book that sounded quirky. Sometimes the book in my hands just had the right description to suit my mood.

As easy as it was to read a book that felt right at the moment, I also found it not hard at all to put a book down if it didn't feel right. In the past, putting a book down was usually accompanied by a disappointing realization that I may never be reading that book ever. The time-constrained Athira however accepted that there can be another time or day for that book. Maybe never, but that was okay too.

One quality that many of my books read last year shared is that they were quick reads that could be easily put down whenever the baby and now toddler preempted my reading. This explains the higher number of books compared to last year (50 vs 47) and also the lower page counts (7168 vs 9344).

Without further ado, here's my 2016 in numbers:


Planning for 2017

2017 is already shaping out to pretty much the same pattern. Spontaneous reading is deciding my reading for the most part. I am continuing to stay away from making reading lists. I did however decide to do the Read Harder challenge this year but only to help pick my next read when I'm looking for options and not as a list to follow through the year. I will also be reading books via my Postal Book Club but that's probably the extent of my reading planning for this year.

I can't wait to read about YOUR 2016 review and/or 2017 reading. I'm slowly making the rounds through bloglandia. Tell me one thing though - are you planning to do any readalongs this year?

Comments